A little over a year from now, someone will take the oath of office to become Georgia’s new U.S. senator, and a Georgia governor will be inaugurated at the state Capitol. Given the political realities of this state, which Mitt Romney carried by eight percentage points, both are likely to be Republicans.
But in politics, “likely to be” is a far cry from “will be,” which is what makes 2014 so intriguing. In the top two statewide races, Georgia Democrats have fielded surprisingly strong, well-funded candidates who under the right conditions are capable of pulling off an upset. Even if they lose, Michelle Nunn’s race for the Senate and Jason Carter’s bid for the governor’s office should give us a pretty accurate reading of the state’s political status.
At this point, I’d put the over-under in the two races at five percentage points. Anything closer than a five-point spread would be a good omen for Democrats looking ahead; a margin larger than five points suggests that the GOP grip on the state won’t be seriously challenged until 2020 or beyond.
And while newly optimistic Democrats won’t like to hear it, even that five-point margin may be pushing things. Just four years ago, Gov. Nathan Deal won election by 10 points and U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson won by almost 20. Until proved otherwise, this remains a very red state.
In the Senate race, it’s still hard to believe that Georgia Republicans will nominate the likes of U.S. Rep. Paul Broun as their standard-bearer, even in a crowded field that makes the unlikely more likely. I certainly hope it doesn’t happen, because Broun’s nomination would suggest that the unhealthy, unrealistic extremism that dogs the GOP nationally has taken a particularly firm grip in Georgia, and that would bode poorly for the state’s future.
If Broun does get the nod, it would do more than merely open the door to a Nunn victory. With Broun at the top of the state ticket, moderate and pragmatic voters who lean Republican might have to rethink their loyalties, creating opportunities further down the ticket as well.
The governor’s race has its own wild card, this one in the form of a federal grand-jury investigation into the state ethics commission and its handling of a case involving Deal. It’s a familiar challenge for the governor, who also carried a lot of ethical baggage into the 2010 election cycle. It didn’t seem to slow him down four years ago, and absent further revelations or indictments — rare in an election year — it’s hard to see those allegations having a real impact.
Prosecuting the policy case, on the other hand, should be fairly straightforward. Over the past 10 years, the GOP economic model that promised to bring growth and prosperity to Georgia has instead produced an economy that by almost every statistical measure is falling further behind the rest of the country. While tax cuts for business failed to produce well-paying jobs, we’ve had to cut billions of dollars from education and still have no way to finance critical transportation investment, which has been central to Georgia’s prosperity from its earliest days.
Deal has also put party ideology above the best interests of the state by refusing billions of federal dollars that would provide health insurance to 400,000 to 600,000 Georgians. Many of those affected by Deal’s decision are white, lower-income voters from rural and small-town Georgia who identify as conservatives even though GOP policies have largely abandoned them. It will be interesting to see if Democrats can identify and make inroads with those voters in areas of the state where their party is little more than a ghost poorly remembered.
Carter’s grandfather, former President Jimmy Carter, could make that kind of connection because he really was a peanut farmer from Plains. It wasn’t an act. Likewise, Nunn’s father, former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, was an authentic son of Perry, a small town south of Macon. A lot may depend on the ability of the new generation to renew those connections in a 2014 context.
